{"id":6696,"date":"2020-02-24T12:20:27","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T17:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=6696"},"modified":"2020-02-24T17:33:28","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T22:33:28","slug":"merce-in-three-dimensions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2020\/02\/merce-in-three-dimensions\/","title":{"rendered":"Merce in Three Dimensions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The cover image announcing the new film by Alla Kovgan<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)\ndidn\u2019t want to tell spectators how to look at his dances or how to interpret\nthem. To him, the stage space was an open field, often busy with activity; we\ncould look at whatever drew our gaze. His dances didn\u2019t \u201cgo\u201d with the music the\nway those of other choreographers did. Whether the scores that accompanied them\nwere by his life partner John Cage or by other contemporary composers, the\nmusic wended its own way in the designated amount of time, and the dancers\nrehearsed to counts governed by a stopwatch. The sets\u2014maybe by Robert\nRauschenberg, who also served as stage manager on the Merce Cunningham\nCompany\u2019s grueling tours in the 1960s (partly via a Volkswagen minibus), maybe\nby other visual artists of note\u2014formed another independent strand. So did the\nlighting and the costumes. How these separate entities came together in\nperformance inevitably surprised the performers as well as the audiences. And\nsince Cunningham used various chance procedures in making his dances (say, throwing\ndice onto charts), he may have been amazed at the outcome himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1977, when his work was the subject of a video in the Dance in America series produced and directed by Merrill Brockway, the choreographer studied the ways in which shots of his works could counteract the screen\u2019s two-dimensionality. Cunningham<\/em>, Magnolia Pictures\u2019 new 93-minute film by Alla Kovgan (made in Germany, France, and the United States) not only shoots its dancers in three dimensions, but collages historic, two dimensional black-and-white images in smaller sizes on the screen, often overlaid with print from newspapers or Cunningham\u2019s book, Changes: Notes on Choreography.<\/em> This practice allows us to choose (or stumble upon) those visions most meaningful to us, or to accept multiplicity and not worry about what we didn\u2019t see. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Merce Cunningham as seen in Cunningham<\/em>, a Magnolia Pictures release. \u00a9 Robert Rutledge. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Merce would surely have\nappreciated Kovgan\u2019s effort not to direct our focus too stringently or dictate\nmeanings to us about the excerpts from fourteen dances she has chosen to show.\nIn his 1955 essay, \u201cThe Impermanent Art,\u201d he wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So if you really dance\u2014your body, that is, and not your mind\u2019s enforcement\u2014the manifestations of the spirit through your torso and your limbs will inevitably take on the shape of life. We give<\/em> ourselves away at every moment. We do not, therefore, have to try<\/em> to do it.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film\u2019s sequences in color are ravishing and unexpected. Various of the fourteen dancers appear in the former Cunningham studio, on the Westbeth roof, in a forest, on a pink floor in a garden, in a corridor whose ornate wooden grills slide back and forth, in a glassed-in bridge over the West Side Highway, on two stages set up in the vast courtyard of a European palace, in a dark space under a single light bulb, in a brightly lit tunnel, seen intermittently through the openings in a wall. And more. Kovgan and her Directors of Choreography, Robert Swinston and Jennifer Goggans, must have wanted to convey the company\u2019s travels, but, more importantly, to suggest the ways in which our vision of a work could change. Kovgan has written that she wanted to \u201cre-imagine each as an \u2018event\u2019\u201d like those assemblages he staged in specific locations (often public spaces).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ashley Chen and Melissa Toogood in Summerspace. <\/em>A scene from Cunningham<\/em>, a Magnolia Pictures release. \u00a9 Mko Malkshasyan. Photo courtesy \u00a0\u00a0of Magnolia Pictures. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

We see Brandon Collwes and Jennifer Goggans in the almost violent duet from the 1968 Rainforest <\/em>(originally performed by Merce and Carolyn Brown), the dancers lashing amid Andy Warhol\u2019s helium-filled mylar pillows). We see excerpts from Summerspace<\/em> (1958), in which the performers are not only working in front of the pointillistic Rauschenberg backdrop that mimics their speckled costumes, but on a digitally recreated floor cloth. Between the re-imagined pieces and the historic footage, we get glimpses of twenty-five works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The single camera may occasionally watch the dancers from an airplane or pan artfully, as in a section of Suite for Two. <\/em>We first see the man and his partner in the distance (Daniel Madoff and Jamie Scott)\u2014two small figures in what might be the all\u00e9e of an unseen chateau. As they dance together in quiet intimacy, the camera glides slowly away from them over a bank and, travels backward along a waterway reflecting the overhead greenery, never altering its perspective. Then it advances toward the pair again, as if we\u2019re on a boat retracing its path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dancers on the Westbeth roof, as seen in the film Cunningham. <\/em>
\u00a9 Mko Malkshasyan. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The\nglasses handed out before we take our seats aren\u2019t the old-time red eye\/green\neye sort; they seem like regular glasses until the film begins and we see how\nfascinatingly Kovgan and her crew emphasized the three-dimensional sequences.\nDancers entering the frame in the foreground seem to materialize out of\nnowhere, their largeness emphasized. Often we\u2019re given markers to enhance our\nawareness. For instance, when the dancers are roistering in the woods, the\ncamera has to pass a huge tree trunk that sits between them and us (it\u2019s almost\nshocking). We see <\/em>the distances\nbetween people and objects instead of simply accepting the fact that they must\nbe operating in different planes. (We\u2019ve been going to movies for so long that\nour eyes have been trained how to watch a flat screen and deduce depth.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film contains a wealth of old footage. Cunningham skidding along on his knees (omigod!). Cunningham dancing at the peak of his powers. We get to watch and listen to him and some of the great dancers in his original company: Carolyn Brown, Barbara Lloyd Dilly, Viola Farber, Valda Setterfield, Sandra Neels, Gus Solomons jr. There they are in their youthful black-and-white splendor in clips from the 1967 documentary, 498 Third Avenue.<\/em> The paint is crumbling off the studio\u2019s walls, and the heat doesn\u2019t always work, but we can revel in, say, Cunningham hovering over Neels and Solomons, directing them as they fit together in ways that could seem deliberately erotic in the hands of another choreographer (a fact that Neels later acknowledges in a tired aside to the camera).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(L to R) John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg seen conversing in Cunningham<\/em>, a Magnolia Pictures release. \u00a9 Douglas Jeffrey. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Rich though Kovgan\u2019s film is and as splendidly\nassembled, there\u2019s one thing it doesn\u2019t reveal. In Carolyn Brown\u2019s 2007 book, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with\nCage and Cunningham, <\/em>there are photos that show the dancers\u2019 fatigue, the\nways they found to rest in uncomfortable places, but also their humor and the\nfun they managed to have. Their joy and their intelligence fueled their boss\u2019s\ncreativity, whether he told them that or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d\nlike to honor the former Cunningham dancers who appeared in the film\u2019s\nreconstructions: Ashley Chen, Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Julie\nCunningham, Jennifer Goggans, Lindsey Jones, Cori Kresge, Daniel Madoff,\nRashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, Silas Riener, Glen Rumsey, Jamie Scott, and\nMelissa Toogood. My hat\u2019s off to all of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) didn\u2019t want to tell spectators how to look at his dances or how to interpret them. To him, the stage space was an open field, often busy with activity; we could look at whatever drew our gaze. His dances didn\u2019t \u201cgo\u201d with the music the way those of other choreographers did. Whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6696"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6709,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6696\/revisions\/6709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}